Sentences: Modifiers & Clauses

Now you can form short, basic sentences. Determine the action, who does it, who is the target of the action, and who might participate.

But if you look at the examples, they lack detail. “The man eats an apple”. Okay, but …

• What type of apple?
• What does the man look like?
• When does he eat it?
• How does he eat it?
• Why does he keep eating so many apples?

There are countless more details to give about any part of a sentence. These details will be discussed in the rest of the course. But here’s a summary to already make you familiar with them.

Modifiers

Modifiers come in two types.

• Specifying nouns: these modify the subject or object. (These are always nouns. You’ll learn about them soon.)
• Modifying verbs: these modify the verb.

These details usually answer one of these questions:

• Who?
• What?
• When?
• Where?
• Why?
• How?

These will be explained in-depth later in the course—in the Adjectives chapter.

Clauses

So far, even with modifiers, sentences are really short and basic. You can only say some tiny thing about the existing sentence. What if we want longer sentences? What if we want to combine two related thoughts?

Well, if you can form short sentences … you can form any sentence!

Sentences can be chained together. If you keep words grouped based on meaning, it will be valid. Such an extension is called a clause and place between commas (,).

Two common clauses exist.

• Relative Clauses: these say something extra about the subject or (in)direct object of a sentence. They are placed directly behind the word they talk about.
• Subordinate Clauses: a complete sentence within another sentence. Because it is its own sentence, it needs its own subject and _verb.

These will also be explained more in-depth later in the course—in the Adverbs chapter.

As always, there’s no reason to complicate things. If possible, just keep sentences short. Place a dot and start a fresh sentence. Use a single-word modifier in the right place. These “clauses” will quickly make something hard to read or needlessly complicated.

Why do clauses exist then? Sometimes they are a faster way of communicating something. Sometimes they just sound better. Sometimes it helps the flow or rhythm of the text, like when writing a novel. Some people naturally like speaking that way, while others do not.

In the example above, I connected “the man eats the apple” and “the girl eats the burger” into the same sentence with “while”. This communicates these two things happened at the same time. I could make these two separate sentences, but you’d lose that bit of information.

Language gives you options. It’s up to you how to put them to use.

But … there is a reason why English is especially fond of these clauses.

The English culture

England has always been a culture of snarky and witty remarks. That’s reflected in their language. Sentences often have remarks at the start or end. These are seperated with a comma (,) and sometimes a dash (---). Because it’s just a remark, a quick note, they don’t have to be full sentences.

Once you know this, you’ll see it everywhere. And it will help simplify English sentences for you, as you can strip these comments.

Conclusion

This concludes the chapters on basic sentence structure and word roles.

We’ve seen that sentences are always built from a subject and a verb. The next chapters will, therefore, focus on these two exclusively.

They will start with nouns and their subgroup pronouns. Within a few chapters, you can easily create subjects and objects any way you like.

And then come the verbs. Because we communicate in terms of action, they are the biggest group to learn about. I didn’t want to start with them, as I think nouns are equally important and easier to grasp.

Once these two parts are done, you already should be able to write almost anything you want.

The rest of the course talks about the other word types (the modifiers briefly shown above) and more advanced clauses.